captured video looks lousy

[fyreme1]

Hi,

I am having no luck trying to make a good looking video disk with my JVC GR-DV-5000U.

I am using Ulead Studio8 (trial version). I tried Image Mixer that came with the camera, but I got poor results with it. Using Ulead, the SVCD doesn't come out anywhere near vhs quality. The video is blurry.

When I connect the camera directly to the tv the video is awesome. I bought this camera to have fun with editing and making dvds, I am really frustrated that after 10 hours of trying I cant even make a decent svcd. I don't want to try dvd's until I could at least make decent svcds.

I also don't want to try to make dvds until the avi files look good on the computer in full screen mode. They also look blurry and I'm guessing that if they don't look good then the final svcd or dvd will look poor also. Is this correct?

I am thinking that if i could adjust the compression settings in ulead, I might eliminate some of my problems. The video and audio capture property settings
is greyed out under the options button. Is this because I have the trial version? If so i can't justify spending $100 without knowing if I can make high quality video. I tried the highest quality setting on Image Mixer and it made no differance.

I connect to my computer through a pinnacle firewire card. I was considering a capture card, but after reading articles on the net I don't believe this is the problem. I also found out that virtualdub doesn't work with firewire.

Should I try Microsoft's new compression format, Windows' Media Video? I don't know how to configure Ulead to use this format, it seems to default to AVI.

I'm not afraid of trying anything technical. I had to hack the eprom on my Zenith DVD player to get it to play vcds and svcds. I'm not trying to brag, I just want everyone to know that I have really tried just about everything I can to make good video with no success.

TIA for you help.

PS I'm sorry for the long post but I have so many questions and I really would appreciate your help.

[NooNoo]

Hyre Fyre!

What windows - if its xp, have you tried the movie maker? (make sure you get the movie maker update from windows update though).

[fyreme1]

I found my problem. The source video was washed out because i didn't use the backlight function.

Thanks for your help.